Thursday, February 28, 2008

Watch the Green Witch Melt

Ghost Woman of the Hotel Del Coronado
Pretty Much Gone


The Cowboy wants to be honest for a few sentences. Well get back to the truth later…

Your Humble Cowboy spent a strange grey week hunting for the fabled ghost of the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. There was off-season foul weather, a double conference of lawyers and a mild case of this years’ inoculation (and alcohol) resistant flu strain to set the tone. The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, as the old man said. The ghost proved elusive, but those dayless hours made it clear why this wooden wonder of beachside Americana was the inspiration for Frank Baum to write the Wizard of OZ.

While ghost-hunting, it became clear that, like the green witch, Hillary is suddenly done. (Apparently she also melts under exposure to something as innocuous as fresh water to the face.) It is a strange and twisted experience, like watching a hanging.

We appear to be a country obsessed with watching fools perish at the gibbet of modern media humiliation. Our media, like so much more of Salem’s puritans, delivers a steady viewing of doomed young dreamers and damaged souls alike. Lead by the likes of “American Idol” or that anger-loving Trump show whateverthehell it is called. However, in the real reality, we don’t like to see that stuff. It is uncomfortable, and it reveals us all to be a bit diseased.

We don’t mind a small dose of “yeah but for the grace of God go I..”. The genre ages fast, however, when the poor bastard being wrongfully humiliated, eating bugs or wetting themselves purposely, all towards an obviously losing effort, bears so much resemblance to, well, to us.

Even the Foxwatchers are uncomfortable watching the end of Hillary.

Admit it now, you felt shocked and disturbed when the suffering green witch got melted by that brat farm girl in blue gingham. Sure, the damned flying monkeys were an order of magnitude of terror never seen on the screen before. But still that chemical warfare was extreme. During those terrible final seconds we saw a witch that was somehow less wicked and more vulnerable, more mature. Dorothy looked like she actually savored the sight of her grieving, widowed, dust bowl surviving Aunt getting dissolved away in agony.

Maybe in hind sight, OZ would have been better off with the Wicked Witch. She was experienced, thick-skinned and strong enough to keep the damned terror monkeys from grabbing up all the funny little people and dropping them to their deaths on the dark cliffs above the far off sunless sea. We will never know.

The little farm kid followed a brainless, gutless, soulless trio down to the place of dead roads, only to see the kingdom’s fragile economy and territorial security collapse drunkenly because of one compelling child's’ fantasy. (In the old days that kind of hopeful innocence was called "being naive".) The bratty child escaped back from dreamland. But the little guys were left to fend off flesh eating winged monkeys while watching the technological “grid” of their society collapse into anarchy while the previous wizard stole away with a balloon basket full of looted gold paving stones.

Sound familiar?

Barack Obama may be the best thing to happen to America. There is no doubt that his ability to give young Americans hope and faith in the country may be the exact turn we need to survive. The Cowboy really hopes this is the case. Yet it is alarming how little we really know about the guy.

We don’t know anything about his real intentions, his true values and his actual opinions about things like climate change, the Supreme Court, the Chinese, The FISA Act, Internet regulation, management of our vast and dwindling public lands and many other issues that remain unexplored by Obama's "I Have A Dream" speechwriters. He has a wonderfully brief history of words, but no history of deeds to engender our confidence. The ideas he espouses are stellar (because they come directly from MLK and other great minds). But in his practical abilities there is no proof of life.

The media is a straw man, afraid of pushing, afraid of probing into what he really intends to do as President. Journalism is (still) dead and getting deader. The media would rather hoist Hillary to her demise, as difficult as that is turning out even for them to handle, than confront Obama about his real values and prejudices. It is a sad repetition of history, by good men who do nothing. Like when W. first ran for office, or later when American journalism failed to question his path to War.

Your naive Cowboy wonders if there might even be a connection between the fact that Presidential campaigns shovel several billion dollars of advertising money into the hands of our corporatized media, and their unwillingness to ask tough questions...

It may be fine to once again trust a charismatic young politician with blind faith. But let's not call it change because it is nothing new. It would nice to hear some of this Man’s real ideas, presented with his own words in a legitimate journalistic interview. The inspiring, but intellectually plagiarised speeches of Obama may well lead to a new Camelot, for a new generation. But Camelot was short lived.

And then there are those damned flying monkeys to be dealt with.



Thanks for playing.

Quote of the Week (2.27)

If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?

Scott Adams

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Quote of the Week

When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.

-George Carlin

Monday, February 04, 2008

Take The Long Odds

The key … is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.
Casey Stengel

The Super Bowl just pulled out. It was the grandest sports event in recent history. The circus is gone but there remains a strange aftertaste of something like diet sweetener for the soul. The whole experience reflected a new joyless but safe American Dream we share. Yeah, it was fun, but nothing reckless occurred. Maybe the YOUNG PEOPLE are right. Maybe change in any direction is better for our souls than our current obsession with safety from every peril.

It doesn’t matter. The Cowboy always bets the underdog. I took the Giants over the Pats, not because I follow the game, or even care. It was the principal of the thing. I hold with a sort of sinners prayer of American sports: “Grant me the serenity to accept that all sports are fixed some of the time, that some sports are fixed all of the time, and the wisdom to pick the spread.” That is why I like Obama tomorrow, on Super-Tuesday.

Obama’s campaign is a street-fighting machine that can swing on a dime. They left Carolina behind and embraced a new slogan, “Yes We Can”. (Which means “Si, Se Puede” in Spanish.) In case you have been asleep or east of Albany for the past ten months, you know this slogan was used by Caesar Chavez. It is THE rallying cry for Hispanic voters. They will swing with the wind tomorrow and bury Hillary under the stale sheaves of her own outdated campaign speeches.

Barrack is rolling in 2008. He stole the stoner vote from Ron Paul, he got an endorsement from every Kennedy sober enough to show up for the photo op and he raised $30 million. His face is the favorite of news editors nationwide. He is, to put it bluntly, the new Reagan everyone on the other team has been looking for. He brings fun back to the game.

Tomorrow he will beat Hillary just like the underdog Giants beat the over-hyped Patriots

Hillary campaigned like a deer in the headlights after South Carolina. Maybe it was the hubris of her failure to control Bill’s addiction to celebrity. Maybe she is just trapped in a bubble, run by the two least capable political activist demographics in U.S. history: Women and Gays. I any case, she was Nixon the conqueror for a while, but now she is just McGovern the crybaby. She will be lucky to get a VP slot on Obama’s ticket. The odds are changing. Old is new and new is old.

Hillary outpolled McCain by a 100,000 votes in the Florida primary and that fact should have been her public message ever since. She never mentioned it though, and now it is too late. After Carolina, Hillary just flittered around with a worn out stump speech and a bright yellow jacket.

Obama will run the Democrats’ table after Super Tuesday, but he remains a hard underdog against McCain. An absolute long shot, like Giacomo in the derby last year - a laughingstock entry at fifty–to-one.

Unless she reclaims a commanding lead by midnight on Super Tuesday, Hillary will be gone to the dustbin of POTUS campaign history. McCain is the man to beat and the place to beat him will be on his own turf, right here in Arizona. The person who can beat McCain is a woman, but she is not from New York.

Governor Napolitano is the woman you will want to watch now. Napolitano beat a Mormon Republican to become a western Democrat Governor. That trick might come in handy before the year is out. It is defintely a long shot that Janet Napolitano will second Obama's ticket. Fifty-to-one is about right. Still, it is an easy bet for The Cowboy. And free money at twice the odds.


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